Bennu Close Up

Bennu Close Up

Here’s a close up of the asteroid Bennu. The image is from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (caption below). You will get a larger version by clicking the image above, however, I encourage you to go to the main image on the NASA page and click that one, it is huge and the detail is amazing. Keep in mind I try to keep the image file size reasonable so people with slower connections don’t have to wait too long and that image is a lot larger in terms of file size – but it’s really good.

NASA: This trio of images acquired by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows a wide shot and two close-ups of a region in asteroid Bennu’s northern hemisphere. The wide-angle image (left), obtained by the spacecraft’s MapCam camera, shows a 590-foot (180-meter) wide area with many rocks, including some large boulders, and a “pond” of regolith that is mostly devoid of large rocks. The two closer images, obtained by the high-resolution PolyCam camera, show details of areas in the MapCam image, specifically a 50-foot (15 meter) boulder (top) and the regolith pond (bottom). The PolyCam frames are 101 feet (31 meters) across and the boulder depicted is approximately the same size as a humpback whale.

The images were taken on February 25 while the spacecraft was in orbit around Bennu, approximately 1.1 miles (1.8 km) from the asteroid’s surface. The observation plan for this day provided for one MapCam and two PolyCam images every 10 minutes, allowing for this combination of context and detail of Bennu’s surface.